Re: Proposed amendment (compiling non-free packages from source in main)
Jim Pick <jim@jimpick.com> writes:
> Of course, in reality, none of the ports is building only the "main"
> part of the Debian - they are also building the "contrib" and
> "non-free" parts..
What reality are *you* living in? Not one I recognize. I know that
several (of the tiny numbers of the m68k maintainers) share my
sentiments of not wanting to waste time on non-free or contrib while
main is unfinished, I'm fairly sure Chris (alpha) has expressed a
similar attitude to me in the past. I don't see many uploads by the
sparc or powerpc people of non-free stuff either. There are a
minority of m68k maintainers who compile the occasional thing from
non-free or contrib, but they are a) in the minority and b) spend the
vast majority of their time on main.
> The only downside to this is that it becomes more difficult to
> rebuild all the packages in main automatically without also building
> some non-main packages (using some non-main tools). Since nobody I
> know of currently has this requirement, I think it's a pretty easy
> compromise to make.
Nobody has this requirement? Everyone *but* i386 has the need to
auto-build (and i386 may in the future). So please try and stop
seeing the world centered around i386. This is not just a matter of
me being unwilling to install anything more than the absolutely
necessary amount of non-free software, this is a genuine problem
because some non-free software is source-less and as such is
uninstallable on anything but i386. It's very easy for you to say
"Oh, don't be so silly just install X to compile it", but when X has
no source, it's kind of hard to install X on my non-i386 machine.
Take postgresql: it has a JDK based part, this made the package
uncompilable on m68k without ``tweaking'' because JDK does not and
will not exist for Linux/m68k. While postgresql was unsplit[1] no one
bothered to compile it on m68k because no one had the time to fix it.
It may sound trivial to you to ``alter the debian/rules'' a bit, but
when you have to compile every single upload that is made, you might
see it a little differently. Remember the non-i386 people are
volunteers too and so short in number asking them to fix broken
packages because their i386 maintainers can't be bothered to is not a
winning attitude.
Even if I didn't work on a non-i386 port, I would oppose this change.
It's Wrong. Debian is primarily about free software and our main
distribution is (allegedly) free software only. It may not depend on
anything outside of main at run time or compile time; I don't see your
lack of time as a reason to dilute this policy requirement (because
that is the only reason you've offered for doing it). It makes a
mockery of main to say; well you don't need non-free software to run
it, but you do need non-free software to compile it. Some people
don't use binaries and like to be able to compile from source instead,
they should not be force to install non-free software to use Debian.
[1] This is past tense stuff, I bugged Oliver about this, and he fixed
it. Kudos to him.
--
James - dwww rewrite? gnome debs? Anyone? *sigh*
~Yawn And Walk North~
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